Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/338

328 are referred to a divine origin is of later growth than the institutions themselves. The same is plainly the case with the deification of the phallic emblems used to repel disease, and with the various magical appliances described on p. 196. The object of the myth-maker in these cases was to lend a religious sanction to what was in its origin a non-religious magical procedure. The same principle might be copiously illustrated from non-Japanese sources. On the other hand, there are cases in which a practice based on religion has its original character obliterated, so that it might easily be mistaken for a charm of no religious import.

Bakin on Magic.—I have before me a collection of "vulgar magical practices" (majinahi) made early in the last century by the famous novelist Bakin. It illustrates the confusion, even with highly educated men, between science and magic on the one hand, and between non-religious and religious magic on the other. A good many of Bakin's so-called majinahi turn out to be merely recipes, such as how to remove oil stains from books by an application of lime; to cure costiveness in fowls by doses of saltpetre; to kill the parasites of gold-fish by means of a preparation of human excrement; to keep away bookworms by exposing the books in the sun: "If a pot-tree withers in the middle and seems likely to die, take it out, shake the earth from its roots, and expose it to the sun for one day. Then steep its roots in a drain for one night. When replanted it will thrive." The scrapings of a copper ladle mixed with fish will cure disease in cats. We approach true magic more nearly in the following: "When stung by a wasp, take up a pebble which is half sunk in the ground, turn it over, and replace it, when the pain will at once leave you." The cure of illness from eating poisonous fish by swallowing the ashes of an old almanac seems also to belong rather to magic than to medicine. There